Add to git ignore

Basics of git ignore

The quick procedure to commit and push changes usually implies selecting all changes and pushing them quickly on the remote repository. While this is fine in most cases, one should be careful not to commit certain files, such as large or confidential files.

In order to facilitate this process, we rely on a file called .gitignore located at the root of the git repository. A .gitignore file is essentially a text based file that contains a list of file names or file names expressions (wrote in a form of regular expression, or regex)

.gitignore
.Rproj.user
.Rhistory
.RData
.Ruserdata

/.quarto/
/_site/

Adding a previously commited file in .gitignore

If a file is added to .gitignore whilst having previously been committed, the .gitignore will be, well, ignored. The following describes the procedure to correct this. Using the terminal, here are the steps.

  1. Update your .gitignore file with the new files you wish to ignore, commit and push the changes to this file

  2. Remove all cached files

Terminal
git rm -r --cached .
  1. Add all the files back (the files listed in .gitignore will be omitted)
Terminal
git add .
  1. Commit the new changes
Terminal
git commit -am "Remove ignored files"

Steps 2 to 4 could be achieved in one-line

Terminal
git rm -r --cached . && git add . && git commit -am "Remove ignored files"